James Reinhart (thredUp) - Scaling Sustainable Fashion
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
Stanford eCorner
4.5 • 740 Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2021
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
James Reinhart is the co-founder and CEO of thredUP, one of the world's largest online resale platforms. thredUP designed a digital resale experience that aims to take the work and risk out of thrift in an effort to make used clothes the new normal and create a more sustainable future for fashion. Prior to thredUP, he helped develop one of the nation’s premier public schools, Pacific Collegiate School. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Reinhart discusses how thredUp arrived at its business model, and explores the challenges, pivots, and insights that emerged during thredUP’s decade-long journey to becoming a publicly traded company.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Who you are defines how you build. |
| 0:05.0 | This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series. |
| 0:09.0 | Brought you by Stanford E-Corner. |
| 0:13.0 | Welcome YouTube and Stanford communities to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader seminar. |
| 0:20.0 | I am Ravi Balani, a lecturer in the |
| 0:22.2 | Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford, and the director of alchemists and |
| 0:25.9 | accelerator for enterprise startups. The Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar is brought to you by |
| 0:30.9 | BASIS, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, and STVP, the Entrepreneurship |
| 0:37.0 | Center in the School of Engineering at |
| 0:39.3 | Stanford. |
| 0:40.4 | Today, I am thrilled to be welcoming to ETL James Reinhart. |
| 0:45.3 | James is the CEO and co-founder of ThreatUp, a $2 billion publicly traded company that is |
| 0:51.4 | one of the world's largest online resale platforms. Threadup designed a digital |
| 0:57.5 | resale experience that aims to take the work and risk out of thrift in an effort to make used |
| 1:05.2 | clothes the new normal and create a more sustainable future for fashion. James is also another phenomenal founder |
| 1:13.3 | with liberal arts roots. James studied history at Boston College. And like Reed Hoffman and |
| 1:19.5 | many others, he studied philosophy, political philosophy at Oxford and then spent seven years |
| 1:25.5 | dedicated to secondary school education. He was a high school teacher, |
| 1:29.8 | a communications director. He co-founded a network of the top charter schools. And he also was instrumental |
| 1:36.6 | in developing one of the nation's premier public schools, Pacific Collegiate School. He then graduated |
| 1:42.8 | with joint degrees from Harvard, from Harvard Business School |
| 1:45.7 | and Harvard Kennedy School, where he earned master's degrees in public policy and business. |
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